Lady Chatterley's Lover in Classics Without All the Class

Jan 08, 2010 rachel rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 2010

Without question, this is the least erotic "erotic classic" that I have ever read. Lawrence's euphemisms and metaphors for various sexual acts were so completely bizarre that I'm actually giving the book one more star than I'd planned on giving it, just because I laughed so much.

This book is off the chain. A woman's womb is compared to a sea anemone during sex (seriously, ew). The same woman's father comments at length to her lover that her lover must have fucked her good (EW). Lawrence gives n Without question, this is the least erotic "erotic classic" that I have ever read. Lawrence's euphemisms and metaphors for various sexual acts were so completely bizarre that I'm actually giving the book one more star than I'd planned on giving it, just because I laughed so much.

This book is off the chain. A woman's womb is compared to a sea anemone during sex (seriously, ew). The same woman's father comments at length to her lover that her lover must have fucked her good (EW). Lawrence gives new/a? meaning to the phrase "she preferred to grind her own coffee with her beak," and I am already laughing out loud again as I type this, because "grinding her own coffee" as a euphemism for a female bringing herself to orgasm is one of the funniest and weirdest things I've ever read in a book at all, let alone a work of classic literature. Plus, you can only guess what he was referring to with her "beak". I don't know if Lawrence meant for this book to be so funny in parts, nor do I care.

Aside from the sex, which there is a lot of, I enjoyed Lawrence's writing style. The book has a wonderful opening line and his depictions of spring in the countryside are lovely and lyrical. If he were a writer of lesser eloquence, I don't think I'd have enjoyed this book at all.

I was prepared to disregard the awkward sex above, but then I got to Chapter Fourteen. Wherein our hero Mellors talks about how he forced past lovers to sleep with him even though they didn't enjoy it, and anyway all women who don't enjoy sex with men must be lesbians and lesbians are "even worse" than homosexual men. I understand that Lawrence is a product of his time and in the early 1900's these attitudes were more acceptable. But that doesn't mean I have to like it. I expect more out of someone so progressive in other ways. And I haven't even touched on the bits of racial stereotyping in throwaway lines scattered throughout the book.

For that, I began disliking Mellors and his strong opinions. I also began to dislike Connie for letting this man bloviate on like an expert on the Wicked Ways of Woman when she resents her husband for being a blowhard too, though not on the same subject. But I guess Mellors is super manly with his phallus hunting, so that's the difference, eh?

I would probably be open to trying Lawrence again only on the strength of his way with words. NOT THE SEX WORDS, the other ones. I wish I'd read something else of his as an introduction to his work. But I didn't.

(Oh, and in addition to the unintentional hilarity provided by the text itself, the Modern Library edition was horribly edited and had some hilarious typos. My favorite was one instance of "Connie" being written as "Cornie," which caused me to spend 30 seconds flipping back through my book going, "Who the hell is 'Cornie'? This cannot be real.") ...more

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Sep 30, 2010 Kristi Krumnow rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: classic-lit

It is as if the story begins to go somewhere, then trails off to go simply nowhere. It is as if the author started new chapters with little to no connection to previous ones. The beginning of the text, when she was a young girl, was interesting in regards to her female, and perhaps feminist. experience, yet it never went anywhere. War happened; her loves were maimed; she married. And so?
I wonder if the text would have been more profound if it had been written by a woman. I also wonder if the wo ...more

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Aug 14, 2010 Katherine rated it really liked it

Shelves: classic-literature-reads

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Mar 08, 2008 Ryan rated it liked it

On the back it said this book was tame by today's standards but I actually thought it was still quite graphic. I was disappointed with the female protagonist. For all her talk of being independent she was actually quite needy! ...more

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